in June, a year before, Cavour spent some hours in the
ancestral castle at Santena, which he so rarely visited. On that
occasion he said to the village syndic: "Here I wish my bones to
rest." The wish was respected, the king yielding to it his own desire
to give his great minister a royal burial at the Superga. Cavour had
the old sentiment that it was well for a man to be buried where his
fathers were buried, and to die in their faith. At all times it would
have been repugnant to him to pose as a sceptic, most of all on his
deathbed. Once, when he was reminded in the Campo Santo at Pisa
that he was standing on holy earth brought from Palestine, he said,
smiling, "Perhaps they will make a saint of me some day." He died a
Catholic, and, instead of launching its censures against Fra Giacomo,
the Church might have written "ancor questo" among its triumphs. For
the rest, with minds such as Cavour's, religion is not the mystical
elevation of the soul towards God, but the intellectual assent to the
ruling of a superior will, and religious forms are, in substance,
symbols of that assent. The essence of Cavour's theology and morality
is expressed in two sayings of Epictetus. One is, that as to piety to
the gods, the chief thing is to have right opinions about them; to
think that they exist, and that they administer the all well and
justly. The other is: For this is your duty, to act well the part that
is given to you.

"Cavour," said Lord Palmerston in the classic home of constitutional
liberty, the British House of Commons, "left a name 'to point a moral
and adorn a tale.'" The moral was, that a man of transcendent talent,
indomitable industry, inextinguishable patriotism, could overcome
difficulties which seemed insurmountable, and confer the greatest,
the most inestimable benefits on his country. The tale with which
his memory would be associated was the most extraordinary, the most
romantic, in the annals of the world. A people which seemed dead had
arisen to new and vigorous life, breaking the spell which bound it,
and showing itself worthy of a new and splendid destiny. The man whose
name would go down to posterity linked with such events might have
died too soon for the hopes of his fellow-citizens, not for his fame
and his glory.

After thirty-seven years nothing need be taken away from this high
eulogy, and something can be added. The completion of the national
edifice within a decade of Cavour's death was still, in